Those who read this will see that every single contentious matter (timing, whether the result is binding, rules on broadcasting and advertising spending, and on the distribution of factional manifestoes to voters, freedom of front benches to campaign etc etc etc) has been left to be defined at the time, bad in any case, but even worse when the time will never come. Who is fooled by this stuff?

A e-mail allegedly from David Cameron, sent out by Tory headquarters to journalists including me (For my own amusement I have added some emphases) :

‘In January, I set out our party’s position on Europe. I made clear that the EU needed fundamental, far reaching change - and that Britain would lead the way in negotiating that reform.

I also promised an In-Out referendum once those negotiations were complete, and at any event by the end of 2017. That's the right time to have a vote - it is wrong to ask people whether to stay or go before we have had a chance to put the relationship right.

But make no mistake - my commitment to a referendum is absolute. If I am Prime Minister after the next election, there will be an In-Out referendum. No ifs, no buts. And before the 2015 election, we will do everything we can to make it the law.

That’s why today the Conservative Party is publishing a draft bill that would legislate for a referendum by the end of 2017. We understand that we are in a Coalition government - but we are going to examine every opportunity to bring it before Parliament and try to get it on the statute book.

For too long the British people have had no say about their future in Europe. I am absolutely determined to put that right. Our action today is further proof we’re serious.’

It does make me laugh that even as he pledges no ifs and no buts, the Prime Minister inserts the biggest if he can find in the shops, ‘If I am Prime Minister after the next election’ . And he begins with a ‘but’ the absurd idea that a minority party can get its own Referendum Bill on to the statute book.

And a recent ICM poll, published by the Guardian (but, oddly enough, not picked up much by other media, which I feel it should have been, given its very striking data), showing the Tories at 28%, an extraordinarily low level of support at this stage in a parliament for a party which carries on as if it is the next government.

This was the lowest Tory share since 2002, when Iain Duncan Smith was leader, and also a record showing for ‘other’ parties of 27%, almost equalling the Tory total. This distressingly includes 4% from the BNP, a surge which can please no civilised person .

..aright, the raw data are even more striking. Out of 1001 people polled, 104 said they would not vote, 222 said they didn’t know how they would vote, and 102 refused to say. Thus, 42% of those polled expressed no party preference.

The none-of-the-above party which before 2010 tended to be around 36%, has plainly grown quite sharply, to 42%. How long before it has the majority? . The UKIP vote seems to me to be mainly Tory defectors and predominantly older people, but with a significant number of Labour dissidents now joining in. I suspect Labour would do worse, but for a flow of deserters from the Liberal Democrats back into their old Labour-voting habits.

Tory support is weakest among the 18-24 age-group, at a pitiful 9%, though interestingly it is no better among the old (17%) than it is in the 35-64 age range. I had always assumed that Tory strength was concentrated in the over-70s. Maybe they have broken with the Tories in larger numbers than other age groups. UKIP is significantly stronger in the 65+ age group.

Now, to revisit days, weeks , months and years gone by – my article of October 2007. I said then that we had a unique opportunity to remake British politics. The chances are not quite so clear-cut now, as the Try Party cannot be despatched to its reward with a single blow, as I think could have happened had it been treated as it so richly deserves back in May 2010.

The principal difficulty we have now with habitual Tories is that they have fooled themselves into thinking that their party did in fact win the 2015 election, when it didn’t.

This explains their frequent empurpled rage when their desires are frustrated, on the grounds that the Tories are in Coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Of course, anyone who understands the Tory party knows that these desires , on the EU, on immigration, on crime and punishment and on education, etc, etc, would be frustrated anyway. The Tory party doesn’t actually need the Liberal Democrats to help it take the wrong view on all these subjects. It takes it anyway. How could it be otherwise, when its chief brains are David Willetts, Oliver Letwin and the Right Honourable the Lord (Michael) Heseltine, Companion of Honour?

So we have a double delusion here. One, that the Tories can still win an election, and have done so, when they can’t, and haven’t. Two, that the feebleness of Tory policies is attributable to the wicked Liberal Democrats, rather than to the Tory party’s own conscious and deliberate choices of policies and leaders.

Thus the argument can still seriously be advanced that votes for UKIP might prevent a Tory victory at the next election. You cannot prevent something that isn’t going to happen, and can’t happen. Thus voting for UKIP will have no effect at all on the Tory prospects of forming a majority government. But millions still believe that it might, and may be restrained from taking a perfectly reasonable step, when 2015 comes, by this absurd fantasy.

Next, the fantasy can be maintained that, if there *were* such a Tory majority government under David Cameron, it would be significantly different from the Coalition. It wouldn’t be. It might even be worse, given the grave shortage of talent and intelligence among Tory MPs. It just wouldn’t have so many excuses. But since it couldn’t exist, that’s of no interest.

Thus, the people who have it in their power to demolish the Tory Party and clear the way for real change are heavily restrained by commonly believed falsehoods, which cloud their minds and restrict their willingness to act decisively in their own interest.

Even so, UKIP's success has attracted success, and will attract more success before it begins to falter in the year before the general election. And, as I have mentioned before, the frenzied personal attack on Gordon Brown, which shored up the sagging Tory vote in 2010, cannot be repeated. Much of the loathing then directed at Mr Brown is beginning to turn towards Mr Cameron himself, who is increasingly seen to have portrayed himself as something he was not. Without the Gordon Brown weapon, the Tories will struggle to keep the seats they have, especially since Labour is now aware of the damage which mass immigration has done to its cause and , while it won’t undo the damage, it is prepared to fight dirty on that topic if needs be. Gillian Duffy (referred to by Mr Brown as a ’bigoted woman’ after he met her on his campaign trail, because of her perfectly reasonable views on immigration and welfare benefits) will be wooed, not insulted, in the next Labour campaign. They’re already working on it.

I would like to reproduce here what I wrote in 2007:

‘Even if the Tories could win an election (I speculate on this unlikely event at greater length because so many people now seem to believe that this is the case), what would that mean? I predict a government very similar to that of John Major, only even more torn by its unhealable division over the EU. People forget now, but Major's government was one of political correctness, weakness on crime, failure on education, high taxes and conflict over the EU.

‘It is claimed that the Tories are now more anti-EU. In truth, this is not really the case. Many Tories have shifted from passive acceptance of the EU to what is called 'Euroscepticism', an unrealistic belief that, while the EU is bad for Britain, it is possible for us to negotiate ourselves a safe corner within it, which does not threaten our independence and laws, or the control of our borders. This 'in Europe but not run by Europe' view simply doesn't stand up to practical politics. The EU demands of its members a constant and accelerating surrender of national independence. If you win a small battle, you will rapidly find that the EU tries another attack from a different direction to achieve the same end. Don't like the Euro? How about a constitution? The end result, the whittling away of sovereignty, is the same. Why shouldn't it be? Ever-closer union is the EU's stated purpose.

In practice, those who are honestly in favour of EU membership and all that it entails, or honestly against it (the only two honourable positions in this debate) still cannot possibly agree - and it cannot be long, in the nature of the EU, before any government is confronted with the choice of continued reduction of national independence, or departure. There is no doubt which option Mr Cameron would choose.’

In what way was I wrong? Taxes are in fact rising, though it has been uncontroversial because the opposition would have raised them just as fast. It has been done largely by stealth methods the extension of the ‘higher rate’ to modest earners, the increasing load on council tax, the savings tax through ‘inflation’, which reduces the government debt while shrivelling our savings, and of course the huge green taxes, levied through household bills, funding the mad dash for wind power.

I’d also like to reproduce (in full, as, though I was righter than any other prophet, I was not perfectly right) my predictions for the last election, made two and a half years before it took place:

‘The result of the next election is already decided - the Left will be in office, either with a Labour majority, or a Lib-Lab pact, or a Lib-Con pact, or a Tory government in thrall to left-wing ideas. No radical change, on the areas which Tory voters care about most, will take place.

But it is far more likely that it will be either a Labour government or a Lab-Lib pact.’

I wish, in retrospect, that I had left out the most far-fetched of those options, a Tory government in thrall to left-wing ideas. It wasn’t really possible then (not that such a thing would have been desirable from any rational point of view) , and is even less possible now. What remains wholly unthinkable is a conservative Tory government, a contradiction in terms.

The last line, actually, is now a better prediction for 2015. I can’t presently see much likelihood of a Labour majority, but it’s not wholly impossible, especially if the Coalition stays together and the Lib Dems are dragged beneath the waves by the suction, as the Tory Titanic gurgles and bubbles towards the ocean bed, with Dan Hannan at the prow and Ken Clarke at the stern.

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18 February 2012 10:14 PM

Paul McCartney, who was a popular singing star many years ago and is for some unfathomable reason treated as if he is a serious person, tells us that he thinks the Monarchy is ‘an amazingly old-fashioned affair’.

In that case, I had better call him Mr McCartney. For if he thinks kings and queens are outdated, he must feel the same way about knighthoods, not to mention the MBE that he was careful to cite when he so irresponsibly called for cannabis to be legalised back in the old-fashioned Sixties.

Mr McCartney is much more outdated than the Monarchy. I don’t just mean that anyone listening today to the works of The Beatles must be puzzled and embarrassed that such trivial stuff plunged millions of teenage girls into shrieking hysteria.

I mean that his political views are much the same as those of a student revolutionary of half a century ago, or of a BBC executive (much the same thing). During the past 40 years or so, republics haven’t exactly distinguished themselves, have they?

Apartheid South Africa was a republic. East Germany was a republic. Iran and Iraq are republics. North Korea is a republic. Republican America searched through more than 200 million citizens for a President and came up with . . . George W. Bush.

Yet among the small number of the longest-lasting free, law-governed countries in the world, most are monarchies. This fact would make an adult think.

But like so many children of the Sixties – and children is the right word – Mr McCartney has generally preferred fashionable beliefs to independent thought.

After all, what grown-up, informed person would call for the legalisation of a drug whose users so often end up suffering from incurable mental illness?

The busy, well-funded pro-cannabis lobby will no doubt say that the connection has yet to be definitively proved. The fact so many cannabis users end up tragically mentally ill, or that mental illness has increased since cannabis use became widespread, is not enough for them.

The tobacco lobby used to spread the same complacent story about cigarettes and lung cancer – in fact, they did so for about 30 wasted years, during which many thousands of people were fooled into thinking that smoking was safe.

By the time they found that it wasn’t, they were already dying in pain in the cancer ward, or ravaged by heart disease and emphysema.

The only good news is that Mr McCartney has announced that he has at last given up smoking cannabis. Why? Not because of our allegedly cruel drug laws, anyway. Possession of this substance is supposed to be illegal, and Mr McCartney has made no secret of his taste for it, but British police have taken no action against him for 40 years.

So I wonder why he has given up? It is supposed to be because he is worried about the effect on his youngest daughter, Beatrice, aged eight.

But what about his other, older, children? Wasn’t he just as concerned about them? Whatever the reason, let us hope that, once the greasy fumes of years have cleared away, he realises how much harm he has done by his espousal of this poison and joins the campaign to make it properly illegal again.

There are children now in school, the same age as Beatrice, who may be saved from life in the locked ward of the mental hospital, if he will only recognise that he was wrong..

Policing the forces of tyrannyIn January 2007, I wrote this about the arrest of Anthony Blair’s aide Ruth Turner in the pursuit of the supposed ‘cash for honours’ scandal: ‘Still, silly people are rejoicing over the arrest of New Labour’s Ruth Turner.

This is wrong, dangerous and short-sighted. Just because this creepy totalitarian method has been used against someone you don’t like, it doesn’t mean it’s right. What you do to others will eventually be done to you. If you unleash the police as a political weapon, then you have authorised their use against your own side.

‘One day, when you are whimpering amid the wreckage of your ransacked home or having your DNA swabbed and your dabs taken at the behest of your political enemies, you will complain. And they will reply, “Where were you when they did this to Ruth Turner?” And they will be right.’

The job of the police is to patrol on foot, preventing crime and disorder. If they cannot or will not do that, we would be better off without them. Once they attach themselves to political causes – like the current liberal elite campaign against press independence – they are a monstrous engine of tyranny.

And today in Dictionary Corner... Trevor PhillipsTrevor Phillips, chief commissar of our embryo Thought Police, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, says Christianity is fine in church, but not if its beliefs conflict with the stern will of the liberal state.

He says those who want Britain to stay Christian are like Muslims who want sharia law. That’s what he means by ‘equality’. The ancient religion of this country on which its laws and freedoms are based is now ‘equal’ with Islam.

Now, we do not need to wait for the barbarians. We are so busy enjoying ourselves that we cannot even pass on the basics of civilisation to the next generation.

Teachers report that children arrive at school aged five, still wearing nappies and unable to speak properly. They come from prosperous homes filled with gadgets and – of course – TV sets.

I first warned of this back in 1996, when the long, mad, ultra-feminist campaign to persuade women that bringing up their own children was demeaning and unworthy of them had finally succeeded.

By Christmas 1997, Britain’s female workforce outnumbered the male workforce for the first time. This wasn’t because everyone suddenly agreed with loopy old trouts like Betty Friedan, or anti-marriage fanatics such as Germaine Greer – but because big employers realised that women were much easier to exploit than men.

So off they all marched to work in call centres or banks or human-rights law firms, and their babies were left to whimper in day orphanages and dumped drooling in front of TV screens. Year by year, we pay a higher price for this. What sort of children will these children have?

Where there's a Willetts...Nothing succeeds like failure. Turning British secondary schools into comprehensives was an educational and social disaster almost without parallel.

So now we have decided to do the same thing to our universities. Equality of outcome is to replace equality of opportunity, and politics is to override education.

Professor Les Ebdon, friend of the Mickey Mouse degree, is to be appointed to help achieve this aim.

Can we please stop pretending that this act of national suicide is the responsibility of Liberal Democrat Vince Cable alone? Equally to blame is that most useless of Tories, David Willetts.

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29 May 2007 2:52 PM

Every few weeks I find myself bicycling in the opposite direction to the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, as he heads for Westminster and I pedal towards the Mail on Sunday office. One day I fear there will be a regrettable accident, but so far we have managed to avoid catastrophe. The last time this happened he bawled sarcastically at me "Very fair programme!", presumably a reference to 'Toff at the Top', the documentary on Mr Cameron that I presented for Channel Four.

I was just digesting this encounter when I was confronted with the memorable sight of David Willetts, also on a velocipede, labouring along in his chief's slipstream, spectacles glinting, brains whirring, his sunny Professor Branestawm smile in place as usual. I have to say I worry about him. Intellectuals and machinery do not go well together. I took extra care for the rest of the way in case I met the boyish George Osborne, who also uses this route and once - seeing me hunched on what he regarded as a green, liberal mode of transport - could only boggle and goggle at me. George has much to learn about the harsh realities of life.

Of course, my programme about Mr Cameron (during which I rather pointedly bicycled about the place, so as to demonstrate that bad, reactionary people use bicycles too) could have been fairer. How? Mr Cameron could have made it fairer, by agreeing to be interviewed for it. But his office rebuffed repeated approaches to take part, one of which I know for certain reached him personally, as I took care that it should do so.

And actually - though I am openly and unashamedly biased - I do believe in fairness, to the extent that those I attack should be big enough to look after themselves, and given the opportunity to answer the charges against them. My old friend and adversary Michael Gove took on the hard task of speaking for Mr Cameron in the programme, and was unfairly attacked because he got into trouble while doing so. But he got into trouble because he was loyally trying to defend what he knew to be a weak position. Mr Cameron should have defended himself.

These reminiscences are brought on by the Blue Labour leader's accusation, in a Mail on Sunday article, that his critics on grammar schools are guilty of inverted class war, or some such phrase. Humph. Well, there is a bit of a point in this. There's no doubt that a rich Old Etonian needs to be pretty careful about what schools he prescribes for the middle classes and the poor.

Now, this isn't just me saying so. Listen to the words of Matthew D'Ancona, enthusiastically pro-Cameron Editor of the mainly pro-Cameron 'Spectator', writing in the mainly pro-Cameron 'Sunday Telegraph'. He said: "There is something deeply distasteful about listening to the Cameroons preen themselves over their tough line on state grammar schools, before, without missing a beat, they go on to discuss the selective examinations for top private schools facing their own children."

You may be sure that Mr D'Ancona is speaking from direct personal experience here, and he is dead right. If he finds it distasteful, then Mr Cameron should worry. It won't work to accuse Mr D'Ancona of waging class war, inverse or the right way up. Mr Cameron's Toffishness, and that of his coterie, as I've said before, is important because it blinds him to the growing plight of the striving classes, who don't have his cushion of money.

This policy creates an interesting change in the landscape of scandal and hypocrisy. Tories who paid fees to avoid the comprehensives, used not to be direct hypocrites. Their party had nothing against private schools and was, more or less, in favour of selection and rigour in the state sector - if you didn't look too closely at its record. But now they have dismissed grammar schools as the wrong route to excellence, and endorsed dubious City Academies, they are open to exactly the same jeers as those directed against the Labour grandees who do the same thing or - worse - fiddle their children into secretly selective schools by the judicious use of religion or the purchase of houses in small catchment areas.

Mr Cameron now seems to have pledged to send his children to state schools, which will be interesting to watch. I urge him to convert to Roman Catholicism well before they are 11. For, though the Church of England does some pretty good primaries, it is not so good at secondaries. Cardinal Vaughan, as his fellow left-winger Jon Cruddas can tell him, is an excellent school, but you have to know your Catholic catechism to get in.

I cannot see - by the way - how Mr Cameron's critics' assaults on him can be inverse class war. Surely an upside-down class war would be an attack on the middle class by the upper class? Or on the working class by the middle class? If this were class war, it would be the normal sort, the people below attacking the people above, urged on by the people in the middle. Actually it's not class war at all. It is a straightforward conflict of interest - between politicians who dodge what they think are difficult policy decisions, while being able to afford to avoid the consequences of their cowardice.

Actually, I am by no means sure that a return to selection is that difficult a policy, or that unpopular, which is why Mr Cameron is politically mistaken as well as tactically wrong.

Simon Jenkins, normally one of the sharpest and least conventional commentators, wrote a ridiculous article in the Sunday Times this week. Sir Simon praised Mr Cameron for 'deftly tak[ing] a blow at the old right and speak[ing] the truth all at the same time." He lauded Mr Cameron for his 'aplomb' in 'clearing the decks of intellectual clutter", and compared 'fundamentalist' supporters of grammars with Labour's pro-nationalisation cavemen. This is all very robust and iconoclastic and breezy, but is it right?

Sir Simon asserted that school selection had become 'massively unpopular' by the 1960s. Forgive me for quoting so much from the papers, but they are where our national debate now takes place. Hardly anything ever gets discussed in Parliament any more. Sir Simon made the old claim that the Tories failed to defend grammar schools because they were losing them votes, and may have cost them the 1964 election. Odd, that, given that Harold Wilson, the Labour leader in 1964, would later claim that grammar schools would be abolished 'over his dead body'. Why say that, if they were so unpopular? And I believe there was very strong local opposition in Bristol - and other cities - to the abolition of grammar schools around that time.

I checked the Labour Manifesto for 1964 and it was cunningly ambiguous, offering the mythical beast of grammar education without grammar schools, dreamed of by Anthony Crosland in his 'Future of Socialism' and now being offered again as a 'grammar stream', or rather 'grammar sets' since he apparently doesn't believe in streaming, by Mr Cameron.

Funny that this has never actually worked in practice. This is presumably because you need the whole ethos of a school, not just a few isolated classrooms, to produce the grammar school effect. But it is an old idea. The 1964 Labour manifesto said: "Labour will get rid of the segregation of children into separate schools caused by 11-plus selection. Secondary education will be reorganised along comprehensive lines", so far, so straightforward. But then it added "Within the new system grammar school education will be extended: in future no child will be denied the opportunity of benefiting from it through arbitrary selection at the age of 11" (my italics).

I cannot be sure if the drafters of this document believed what they were saying, but it is quite clear that they recognised that grammar school education was popular and desirable. So they pretended that by abolishing it for some they would make it available for everyone, and they would extend it. How they can honestly have believed that it could be offered to everyone, I do not know. But why was there nobody around to suggest that more grammars could be founded, that secondary moderns could be encouraged to establish sixth forms that the missing technical schools should be built? Why was it abolition or the eleven-plus, and nothing in between?

Maybe I was too young at the time, but I can't remember school selection being a big issue in the 1964 election, or the one after, in 1966, in which I did last-minute 'knocking-up' (badgering voters who had pledged their support but hadn't yet turned up at the polling station, since you ask) for the Labour Party in the back streets of Cambridge, dressed in the uniform of my then Public School. Perhaps there's some evidence someone could produce. Even if it was, selection is certainly not a vote-loser now, after people have seen what comprehensive education does in practice. Recent opinion polls, not apparently designed to produce this result, came up with the clear message that 49% of all voters, and 70% of Tories, now support selective education.

Sir Simon, like so many participants in this debate, seems to think that discontent with selection at 11, and perhaps with there being too few grammar school places, equates to support for the comprehensive system. Sir Simon mocks those who say that you can have selection without the eleven-plus as believing in 'immaculate selection', which is a jolly witty phrase but ignores the fact that Germany does indeed have selection without an eleven plus, and it works pretty well.

As for the transparently silly claim that by shutting grammar schools you benefit the non-grammar pupils, made by so many supporters of this unhinged vandalism, I am indebted to the Graham Brady, Tory Shadow Europe Minister (at least he holds that brief now, but I'm not sure it can last) who has gravely embarrassed Mr Cameron by producing some research showing that selection improves results in all schools in grammar areas, not just in grammar schools.

The reason why this controversy has run for so long is that it matters so much, and says so much about those who take sides in it. Here's a puzzle for you. If selective education benefited the country, even if it was unpopular, would it be the duty of a serious politician to argue in favour of it? I think it's easy, because I cannot imagine being in politics unless I believed first of all in the good of the country.

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22 May 2007 2:36 PM

Here is a sad story from the days when good grammar schools were being smashed up all over the country. It is actually written by someone who supported the change, as you can see. Here she is recounting what happened when her girls' grammar school was merged into a mixed sex comprehensive.

"Gradually old (and often outworn) standards were allowed to slip - we no longer stood if senior teachers entered the room....

"Greater repercussions were felt the following year when more Shotover (secondary modern) pupils arrived. Feuds started when staunch Grammar and Secondary Modern girls clashed over territory. The boys had the run of a quiet school and, with no seniors to crack whips, wreaked havoc. Windows were broken, the ...bicycle store had to be closed...few of the teachers were used to handling boisterous teenagers...Academic standards fell because joint CSE/O level classes were timetabled, which combined people who wanted to study with people who quite definitely did not. Teachers left because of the changes in the atmosphere at the school and, looking back now, I can see that the unrest affecting both staff and pupils left little peace of mind to concentrate on study."

It is only fair to the author of this memoir to add that she goes on to say that eventually things settled down, and some lessons were learned. But she adds, "Although the premises are the same, the schools before and after the changeover are completely different entities. Comparison is therefore almost impossible and certainly unfair. I think, however, that the present system may be more realistic than the old one; outside schools or universities everyone is thrown together, and people have to find their own level of skill rather than fit in with someone else's idea of where they should be."

I would comment that schools are there to educate, not to socialise people, and I would rather have a little social awkwardness and a well-educated population than an allegedly classless society (which isn't really classless at all) and a badly-educated population.

What makes this spare, sad account of an avoidable, mournful little moment in our history is that the school involved was being attended, at exactly this time, by Theresa May, or Theresa Brasier as she was then. It was Holton Park girls' grammar school, a few miles outside the City of Oxford (close to Forest Hill where John Milton's wife grew up) now long merged into the Wheatley Park comprehensive. Mrs May was for a while the Tory shadow Education Secretary. She was on BBC Question Time on Thursday last week, defending David Cameron's policy on grammar schools.

Now, here's the interesting thing. Mrs May joined Holton Grammar at the age of 13 (later than the usual 11) from a private school, in 1969. She then had about two years of grammar school education. And she completed her schooling at a new comprehensive, successfully enough to win a place at St Hugh's, then a women-only college at Oxford. But in 'Dod's Parliamentary Companion', the more detailed 'Who's Who' for MPs, she sums up her secondary schooling as 'Educated at Wheatley Park Comprehensive School'. As you see, it's a lot more complicated than that. And I don't think she needed to use the word 'comprehensive' when describing her school.

Why do so? A lot of Labour MPs who went to grammar schools carefully hide this by just giving the name of the school without saying what sort it was. It is easy to see why the party that actively destroyed the grammars would behave like this. But why should a Tory be so keen to be seen as part of the revolution? I suspect it is because she thinks it politically wise. Senior mainstream Tories have for years accepted the comprehensive revolution as an unalterable fact, which is one of the reasons they have done little or nothing to reverse it. But they are sensitive about it, as so many of their supporters would like to see the grammars back. To mention that you have had even a bit of a grammar school education is, oddly, more sensitive than to say that you went to Eton or Shrewsbury.

I'll turn, in a while, to the arguments for grammar schools. But first it's important to see why this causes so much trouble in the Tory Party - and why in my view it may well cause the end of David Cameron's long honeymoon with a party he privately despises.

It is dangerous because it reminds people of something they prefer to ignore, out of politeness. The leadership of the Tory Party doesn't like, or specially understand, its membership or its voters. Senior Tories are mostly either Toffs or intellectual snobs, who enjoy the company of their Labour counterparts much more than they enjoy meeting their suburban constituents.

Tory conferences have always been specially ghastly because you have to watch men you know to be pro-EU, multicultural softy social liberals making clunky speeches they don't believe, about patriotism and limiting immigration and cracking down on crime. The amazing thing is that this brazen dishonesty almost always works, and wins the required thunderous applause. Only once, when Michael Portillo tried to identify himself with the SAS, has it gone seriously down the plumbing. I often think that Mr Portillo never really recovered from it, and all his subsequent wanderings and reinventions resulted from it. Suddenly he had exposed to everyone the naked fraud that lay at the heart of the Tory Party, and the ghastly sight was unforgettable for all involved. Mr Portillo and the Tory Party each learned quite a lot about each other. Sadly too few people learned any general lessons from this about the Tories.

But now they may. David Cameron and his supposedly brainy Education spokesman, David Willetts, are trying to suck up to Liberal Democrat voters, who they think are the key to their future - and who are much more their type of people than Tory voters.

To do this, they have long sought a noisy, but politically meaningless battle with the crusty colonels of the Tory Party, as they imagine them to be. They think that such a battle will encourage Liberal Democrat voters to return to the Tory Party, which they apparently regard as intolerant, racist, homophobic, etc. I suspect Mr Cameron of having hoped to provoke Norman Tebbit into resignation or furious attack, but the old polecat is much too cunning and wily to be manipulated in this way.

So, to provoke a general insurrection by the supposed crusties, whom they then hoped to mow down with fusillades of modernist derision, they picked grammar schools as the subject for battle. It appeared cost free, since they were never really in favour of them anyway, to come out against them as a cure for the seething, unjust mess which is British secondary education. Mr Cameron is much too grand to have any idea why anyone should care about this subject. Mr Willetts suffers from that wisdom-free sort of cleverness that means he can persuade himself of nine impossible things before breakfast, if asked nicely.

It wasn't new. Mr Cameron had said it before. He didn't need to do it again. And he duly got his public quarrel. But I think it is much bigger than he intended or expected, and that - though he has stuck absolutely to his original arrogant posture - it is going to cost him much more than it gains.

Outside the Tory Party and its supporters, school selection is actually regarded as a closed issue. A few liberal commentators may praise Mr Cameron vaguely, but that is all. They long ago decided that grammars were wrong and bad. But inside the Tory Party, and among Tory voters, it is not.

It is perfectly true that the very rich can buy their way out of comprehensive schooling. But most Tory voters are not rich. They are middle class, and not always at the fat end of it.

And the middle class, increasingly, cannot afford school fees. And they are also directly and sharply aware that the Blair/Blunkett claims of improvement have turned out to be empty. What can they do? They are powerless to help their own children, a horrible position to be in. Private school fees, which are rising fast, are beyond them. So are the prices of houses in the catchment areas of better schools. They are in the terrible position of knowing that their local comprehensive will not merely fail their children, but quite possibly damage them, and that they can do nothing about it. This is not snobbery.

Grammar schools mixed the classes as never before, but raised people up. Comprehensives have the opposite purpose, having been designed with the specific aim of creating a classless society, in which the middle class would be the main losers, as they are in all such egalitarian arrangements. Many such schools have an ethos actively hostile to achievement, plus a great deal of very nasty low-intensity bullying directed against anyone who is even slightly different. And they have weak authority, often in vast establishments, so that little can be done about either of these things.

For such people, the idea of a new grammar school in every town - now extinguished - represented a real hope for their beloved children and grandchildren. Nor are they wrong to think this way. A friend of mine was told last week by a (very left-wing) teacher of his acquaintance that he has watched bright children suffer year after year in comprehensive schools, which simply cannot create the facilities in which they can be properly taught. Over the past 40 years, this must mean millions of bright boys and girls have had their talents wasted, a tragedy for them, and a disaster for the country.

Mr Cameron simply has no understanding of this pain at all. He is the butterfly upon the road, preaching contentment to the toad as it groans in pain beneath the harrow's teeth. That is why he deserves everything he gets.

Leave aside the much bigger issue of whether a selective system would be better for everyone, which I believe it would (and will come to). He just hasn't a clue what his own supporters are going through. That is why he has misjudged so badly and, when he fails (as he is bound to do) a lot of people will reckon the beginning of his failure from last week.

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Now, in the form of questions and answers, I should like to go through the argument about grammar schools, and say why they should and can be brought back throughout the kingdom.

What was so good about grammar schools?

They worked. Let us be clear that they were not perfect. A lot of bright children from poor homes did not get into them. But a significant number did. There were not enough grammar schools - provision was very patchy, so that it was much harder to get into grammars in some counties and cities than others. The secondary moderns to which 11-plus failures went were often very poor schools. The technical schools planned in 1944 were never built in any numbers. But one thing is quite certain - abolishing grammar schools did not increase the number of bright children from poor homes getting a good education.

If they were so good, why did we get rid of them at all?

A fascinating question. David Cameron maintains that selection was unpopular with voters. I can find no evidence of this, or that it was a big issue in the 1964 election which put a pro-comprehensive Labour Party in office. I think the attack on grammars was driven by leftist dogma, and the pretence that somehow destroying the grammar schools would improve the lot of those who didn't go to them, an idea which is obviously quite mad as soon as you think about it, and has been proved to be mad by the results. The inventor of Comprehensive Schools (who also invented the expression) was Sir Graham Savage, a civil servant who wanted Britain to emulate the American High School system because it would be more 'democratic'. Savage recommended this in the 1920s after a long visit to New York State and Ohio, but found few takers until after World War Two, when he was involved in setting up the early comprehensives in London. Savage always accepted that there would be a decline in quality, but he never realised how great it would be.

What about the Labour Party?

To begin with, in 1945, they were in favour of grammars and put into action the 1944 Education Act which the wartime coalition had passed. Most people in those days rightly saw the provision of free grammar education, for all who could pass an exam, as a great step forward. Only later did Labour decide it was in favour of comprehensives. In fact, the switch came in the 1950s, as many Labour intellectuals began to see that nationalising industries wasn't a specially good way of making the country more socialist. They really hated the private schools, but only a dictatorship could destroy them. They could restrict them to the rich by abolishing the tax concessions that helped the middle classes pay the fees (Roy Jenkins later did this as Chancellor, and the current government has found and is finding, other ways to make private schooling even more expensive and exclusive). But they couldn't kill them entirely.

It was easier to attack the grammars, as that could be done without confiscation or force. Anthony Crosland, the privately educated author of 'the Future of Socialism' never understood how disastrous his enthusiasm for comprehensives would be. It is clear from that book that he thought the comprehensives would all be streamed, and continue the same sort of rigorous education that the grammars had provided. But the left-wing enthusiasts had other ideas. They were motivated mainly by egalitarian politics, not by educational theory. They believed in 'mixed-ability' classes and were also opposed to old-fashioned discipline. And, since the comprehensive revolution coincided with an enormous expansion in the teaching profession, to cope with the great post-war baby bulge then reaching the secondary schools, they were able to introduce these new ideas much more easily than if the profession had remained as it was.

What is the evidence that grammars were good?

The best evidence comes from the vast number of people now in the professions, politics, the arts, the theatre, literature, journalism and TV who came from very ordinary backgrounds and were lifted up to the top, mainly by the grammar school education they wouldn't otherwise have had. Michael Howard, Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown, David Puttnam, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, Cherie Blair are just a few examples snatched almost at random. Many others, not so spectacular, helped make us so pre-eminent in science that in the late 1950s and 1960s the USA raided our universities for talent on such a large scale that it became known as the 'Brain Drain'. As for university entrance, if you combine Direct Grant schools and grammar schools, state-educated children were gaining something like 65% of places at Oxford and Cambridge by the end of the 1960s, on a rising curve - without any special measures being taken to favour them. This dropped away from the mid-1970s on as grammars began to be closed. Recent research shows that the state schools which now do gain places at Oxbridge are mostly selective in one form or another. Bog-standard comprehensives barely figure. In Northern Ireland, where selection is still pretty much universal, working class children do better than their equivalents on the comprehensive mainland and results in general are better.

Wasn't the eleven-plus very cruel? Surely it was wrong to throw a child on the scrapheap for failing a test at the age of eleven?

Yes, it was. And yes, the Secondary Moderns were often awful. But it is a very strange, not to say unhinged, response to this to spend billions of pounds destroying almost all the grammar schools and then creating a national system of even bigger and more uncontrollable secondary moderns, so that everyone without rich parents is now treated as badly as an eleven-plus failure was in the 1960s, if not worse. By the mid-1960s, a growing minority of Secondary Moderns had opened sixth forms and were getting pupils through 'A' levels and into university. I strongly suspect that many comprehensives. disorderly and demoralised, now offer a much worse education than many Secondary Moderns used to.

The grammar schools worked well for those who went to them. But not enough children did go to them. . To look at the old tripartite system in 1965 and to conclude that the best cure was to shut the grammar schools is like looking at a patient with gangrene in his right leg, and proposing to cure him by sawing off his healthy left leg.

Many other things could have been done. More grammar schools could have been created, especially for girls. The Secondary Moderns could have been lavished with much of the cash spent on failed comprehensive plans (for which there never was, and never has been since, any educational argument).

The Technical Schools, proposed in 1944 but never built, should have been built. Many, many children do not benefit from academic education but do benefit greatly from vocational teaching. Our economy and society continue to suffer daily from this lack, which is one of the reasons for the importation of huge numbers of migrants to do important jobs that our own school-leavers do not know how to do.

As for the eleven-plus, it is not by any means the only way of selecting pupils. Germany has selection in all its states - recently reintroduced in the former East Germany (proof, by the way, that you can bring grammar schools back, in this case after an absence of 50 years). But it is done by mutual agreement between home and school, and those who believe they have been unfairly allocated are given the chance to prove themselves. There is no reason why pupils could not transfer later, at any age, if they show themselves to be suited for grammar school.

Why is selection good?

That depends on the kind of selection. Open selection, on academic grounds, is surely the way to select pupils for schools. If you don't have this kind of selection, then it doesn't mean you don't have any. We have a great deal of selection at the moment, by religion, by catchment area, by 'interviews' and other stratagems designed to uncover the class and background of the pupil. There are also the 'sixth-form colleges' which manage to exclude large numbers of disruptive pupils by waiting for them to leave school and offering only academic 'A' levels to keep away the non-middle-class intake. No good school could long survive without selection of some sort. Labour politicians are especially adept at wangling their children into good schools by using it. But it is covert, unfair, based on wealth and influence and cunning. Academic assessment is fairer and better.

We should not try to seek perfection here. It is not available. We should instead pursue the best possible arrangements. It is true that non-selective schools can sometimes be very good under a strong charismatic head, that large injections of private money can improve matters. That is basically how the very small number of City Academies manage. But for most schools, exceptional heads and pennies from heaven are not really very likely. They have to make do with ordinary heads and the usual budget. The trick is to create a structure which promotes quality, discipline, order and learning. And the selective system does that more effectively than any other.